Nicholas Carr on the Future of Computing—andof Us

“Second Life may be only a game, but its central conceit—that we can separate ourselves from our bodies and exist as avatars in a digitized landscape—is more than an amusement. It’s a metaphor for our future.”

At the dawn of this new technological age, many voices predicted changes that would end disease, hunger, and war around the world. They imagined a clean, efficient, quiet social and environmental harmony where the taming of wind, water, and other natural powers would create clean power sources. New communication and transportation systems would eliminate distances. Eventually, each human “machine” would develop to its highest possible level of productivity, and all the human machines would gather together to act in unison, so that we as a planet reach a new form of communal understanding and create a new foundation for peace.

Sound vaguely familiar? A bit like the technovangelists for our new digital world? Actually these claims came from futurists and believers in the unending progress that technology could generate when they were writing at the turn of the twentieth century and were applauding the advent of a widespread, indeed ubiquitous, new technology: electricity.

Gleaning the Future from the Past

American technology has always been about hope and progress and panaceas for vast social, economic, and scientific problems. And while it is easy to laugh at pasterrors in predicting the future, it is much harder to piece together real insight into the future effects of currently developing technologies. But it is always worth doing, if done carefully. Historical parallels can enlighten and reinforce projections, helping us glean possible futures by understanding similar events of the past.

In his latest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, Nicholas Carr explores the many parallels between the development of electricity and that of digital technologies. His previous book, Does IT Matter?, argued persuasively that information technology, like electricity, will eventually become a commodity, eliminating the costly need for installing and maintaining software on corporate sites as well as in the home. Instead businesses and individuals will use terminals to access and pay for software services online as needed. Over time, they will store their data offsite as well. Thus boxed software applications, PCs, and large corporate IT departments will give way to remote, less powerful terminals as software and storage become services that are largely commodities.

Technology and Social Change

The Big Switch explores the effects of these trends, both how business organizations will evolve as well as the ways in which the new economic and market forces will shape how society adopts, distributes, and uses technology. Electricity, like information technology, created massive social changes, although indirectly. Entire industries collapsed and others surfaced and grew. The ice business, for example, was large and worldwide in 1880. Ten million tons of ice per year changed hands, creating millions of dollars in profits for companies who brought it from the frozen north to warmer climes. All that changed when electricity made it possible to make ice locally and eventually in the home.

Other industries were born and thrived in the new economic environment: Electric companies like Westinghouse and General Electric got their start making electric components and systems that they sold to private electric plants. Once large-scale central electric stations began to take hold, those companies supplied generators and other major equipment to the utilities themselves. Capitalizing on the businesses that became available with the wide distribution of on-demand electricity to the home, they then started manufacturing and selling consumer appliances, thereby taking advantage of that vast new market.

Electricity increased productivity dramatically. In 1912, it took 1260 man-hours to produce a Model T. By 1914, this was halved—down to 617. And by 1923, this number shrank by more than 60% to 228 man-hours. As the work became more tedious and the rising demand created the need for more and more workers, Henry Ford faced labor shortages, and so decided to double the wages he offered to his men. (It is also argued that Ford was creating his own consumers by paying laborers enough money so that they could afford to buy automobiles themselves.) In this and other ways, electricity helped create the middle class in America.

Our Digital Future

So how will this next switch to adopting services supplied over the computer grid change us? And what will be the overall social and economic impact? Carr believes that, unlike electricity, which is distributed via discrete appliances in specific locations at home and in the office, computing can—and more consistently will—occur remotely and invisibly, in something vaguely understood as “the computer in the cloud.” Businesses will gain enormous flexibility from this setup, assembling computer services from outside sources, such as salesforce.com, without the limitations of their own data centers. And Carr projects that cloud computing, or the World Wide Computer, will come to dominate our personal lives even more than the PC and the World Wide Web already do—which is not necessarily a good thing:

“Soon, the World Wide Computer will know where we are and what we’re doing at almost every instant of the day. We will exist simultaneously in the real world and in the computer-generated world. In programming the World Wide Computer, we will be programming our lives. Second Life may be only a game, but its central conceit—that we can separate ourselves from our bodies and exist as avatars in a digitized landscape—is more than an amusement. It’s a metaphor for our future.”

Intriguing as all this sounds, the idea of existing in two worlds—separating our real and physical selves from our “programmed” selves—is a bit murky. It’s unclear exactly what Carr is getting at here. Contemporary cognitive neuroscience tells us that the brain and the mind are formed through interactions with myriad thought processes, external stimuli, memories, and emotions. So it seems we ought to be moving ever further away from thinking that the mind and the body can be separate entities.

Whatever Carr believes this future may be—one self stuck in the old twentieth-century body and lodged in the earthly mud of this planet, another self busy programming a second life in the disembodied ether—he does not embrace the idea enthusiastically. We may be coming to live inside the World Wide Computer, but it will hardly be the utopia others so optimistically anticipate. Economic factors will change how we work or even if we work at all. Circumscribed perspectives may separate and polarize our populations rather than bring them together. A truncated mental life may include a duller capability for remembering and the loss of the ability to think deeply and long about anything at all.

The Wealthy Few

The Internet’s economic model has replaced the physical production of goods that dominated the Industrial Age. Instead we have the much cheaper replication of a service or a software product. This makes it possible for a few people to reach many—and to amass enormous wealth in so doing, so that wealth becomes concentrated among a very few. This trend combined with free labor in so many aspects of Internet, free services like Craigslist and Skype, and the ongoing replacement of human labor with machines will erode the middle class. Already, Carr points out, there are fewer jobs for skilled professionals than there once was as software, hardware, and economics changes the labor force.

The Narrowing View

Paradoxically, free access to information of all types actually narrows one’s perspective, creating a sameness in the content that users choose to expose themselves to. A newspaper, for example, contains a wide variety: local news, national news, international news, analysis, editorial opinion columns, sports, photographs, stock tables, business news, reviews of the arts, movies, TV, etc. Once users access their newspapers online and use filtered news feeds, however, they are far less likely to look at any content to which they’re not predisposed. It’s easier to avoid even looking at the front page items and go straight to what interests one—technology stories, for example, or investment news or golf. Readers no longer browse. They are not exposed to other information along the way. Instead, they target, they click, they jump.

In the end, personalized searches and filters actually restrict a user’s sources of information. And studies find that when people are given a choice, they choose not to explore new areas and opinions but to access material like the material they already know and already like, thereby polarizing opinions. When people’s opinions are reinforced by others, those opinions become even stronger and more radicalized. The economics of the online newspaper changes as well. Advertisers can no longer depend on browsing or the pull of classified ads to catch consumers’ attention. They too want to target, paying by the click. Hence the stories that attract the most readers will also get the high-priced ads, thereby stacking the deck for articles where people might be purchasing goods and services, such as home improvements or investing, rather than a solid piece of investigative reporting about diseases in third-world countries or government corruption at home. All this provides little economic support for good journalists. As the head of the New York Times web operation put it:” How do we create high-quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?” Carr contends that the “culture of abundance” is a culture of mediocrity “many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep.” So much for the glories of access and endless variety.

In the Name of Convenience

In fact Carr sees not liberation but control as the inevitable outcome of our increasingly digitized lives and our worship of convenience at any cost. Control will dictate how workers are used and how consumers are monitored and marketed to. He is convinced that government and corporations will control the most powerful tools for managing the flow of information. An ominous quotation from Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggests one possible dangerous outcome regarding our privacy:

"As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions. A man’s answer to one question on one form becomes a little thread, permanently connecting him to the localcenter of personnel records administration. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from everyone, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web. Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads."

For a long time, Socialist technology tracked the lives of Russians, who fought to maintain some shreds of freedom. In our case, Carr concludes, we are handing over to technology the control to record our lives simply in return for greater convenience.